Gore Street has acquired an 80MW battery storage project from RES.  The project, in Milton Keynes, is ’construction ready’ and will be completed in the next 12-15 months at a cost of £30M. It is currently scheduled to become operational in Q1 2023, but Gore Street is exploring timeline optimisation to bring that date forward.

The company said it now had exclusivity agreements on over 300MW of assets, which are currently subject to due diligence and are expected to close in the coming months.

Alex O’Cinneide, CEO of Gore Street Capital, the company’s investment manager, said the acquisition adds one of the UK’s largest assets planned for development to Gore Street’s portfolio, which “At 520MW … is the largest portfolio available to a financial investor and one which has the youngest portfolio of assets.” He also claimed the “most cost-effective acquisition history in the market,” saying “the company believes that GSF’s installed cost per MW is close to half that of the closest peer that we have analysed.”

Over 75% of Gore Street’s portfolio consists of 1 hour duration batteries. It said those were “these assets are the most cost-efficient energy storage assets available today and best suited to execute flexible revenue stacking services over the long term, as well as being part of a portfolio which is designed to be capable of upgrade to meet the changing needs of the market”.

In a trading update the company said that Q1 2021, it had paused Dynamic Containment strategies on certain assets for short periods of time to capture particularly high trading revenues available in the market, providing increased profitability.  It said, although  grid balancing contracts are currently more profitable than trading most of the time, “Gore Street has demonstrated its ability to participate in different markets and opportunistically capture market prices when attractive.”

In total, the Company now has over 1.0GW in its pipeline across the UK, Europe and North America.